At an early age, motivate your child to play and learn. Playing is an essential part of your kid’s development. It allows our children to use their creativity while developing their imagination, physical and emotional strength.
The question is should you involve your kids in sports?
As written by Will Hitch from Pitchero Blog, below are the nine reasons why kids should play sports:
Improve physical health.
As I have mentioned above, children who play sports will improve their physical health and skills. According to Public Health England’s 2014/15 child obesity figures, 9.1% of 4-5-year-olds are obese, with that figure rising to 19.1% for children aged 10-11. It is one of the reasons why it is vital for them to get involved in sports as young as possible.
So, instead of letting your child sit on the sofa and watch his or her favorite tv show. Encourage your child to start playing any sport what will catch his interest.
Lifelong well-being
Playing sports means promoting a healthy lifestyle. As a parent, we must show our child how vital a regular exercise is. From then on, our child will follow. Will Hinch also states in his article that “A fit and active body has been proven to translate into a fit and active mind.” It will also reduce stress and increase mental health by getting your kids active.
Develop social skills
Your child’s social skills will develop through sports involvement. One best example is participating in team sports. Team sports require cooperation and participation of all the participants. This way, children will think and realize that they need to interact with other people.
At a young age, they will learn to trust, give respect and make friends with other children. So, we must expose our child to the environment and allow them to communicate their ideas and listen to others as part of the group. You will never know the functional effect of such team involvement of your child in future once he became adults.
Build self-esteem and confidence
Another benefit of sports involvement at a young age is building self-esteem and confidence. If you are a parent or a coach, the child looks up to you as an authority figure. Help your child in gaining self-esteem and confidence by giving those compliments and praises. Recognize their achievements and highlights the areas where they are doing well. Give them rewards and support them through words of encouragement. Thus, it will give your child a boost to their self-esteem. They will also learn to listen and accept good or bad criticism.
It could even go somewhere
As early as now, talk to your child and learn what they wanted to become when they grow up. Allow them to explore and be involved in different sports activities. Be a role model in looking into sports involvement with a positive mindset. From then on their love for sports will grow and will soon become an aspirational reason to continue doing sports. Do not convince nor for force them to join in sports. But instead, let them realize and enjoy how great it is to be involved in sports. Who knows that this will bring them somewhere in future?
Invigorate friendly competition
Sports involvement is competitive in nature. Aside from the mentioned reasons why kids should play sports. Another benefit is that your child will develop a healthy mind and a desire to win. Healthy competition is accepting a defeat. It also focuses on bringing out the best in each member of the team. Moreover, it also focuses on continuously looking for team improvement. We must not forget that healthy or friendly competition is about good sportsmanship, having the right attitude, empathy, and respect with one another.
Learn valuable life-lessons
As we all know, nothing comes for free, and success is better when you worked hard to achieve it. Through sports involvement, we will eventually learn the valuable life lessons. We must have the right attitude and character. Sports will help us appreciate that success and rewards come off the back of hard work. All the learnings and experiences will guide us and be our stepping stone later in life.
Make new friends
As the saying goes “No Man is an Island.” We all need our family, friends and loved ones in our daily life. In one way or another, children will make new friends by allowing them to participate in sports. They will meet new people that could develop into their lifetime friends. Let them engage and socialize with their new environment. Let them enjoy not only the four corners of our home. Let them feel loved, involved in a team atmosphere. One way to achieve this is by going out and join such sports team activities or joining a club.
Breed academic success
Some studies highlight how exercise can have a direct influence on your success at school. One example is from academics at the University of South Carolina and Pennsylvanian State University in 2013. They found that taking part in team sports as an extracurricular activity has a consistent and significant effect on student’s grades – including a higher probability of them progressing to higher education.
As a result, a sport will help your child enhance his mind to think more apparent and be more creative. It also improves the memory and increases our mood. It will make your child physically and mentally healthy. Thus it will result in a good performance in their academic standing.
Benefits of sport for children
Some of the many benefits of sports participation for children include:
- Reduced risk of obesity
- Increased cardiovascular fitness
- Healthy growth of bones, muscles, ligaments, and tendons
- Improved coordination and balance
- A more significant ability to physically relax and, therefore, avoid the complications of chronic muscular tension (such as a headache or a backache)
- Improved sleep
- Mental health benefits, such as higher confidence
- Improved social skills
- Improved personal skills, including cooperation and leadership.
Above all, give your child lots of options concerning sports. We have various of sports game and activities where they can join and participate. But we must ensure that they are enjoying and having fun, Give your child unconditional love and support in whatever field they chose.
